Attendee Communications Best Practices

Practice overview

How to safely preview, target, write, and send event communications. This practice guide explains the standard that should shape decisions in event operations, especially when people, privacy, money, access, or public information are involved.

Principles

1. Use the least surprising action. Do the narrowest thing that solves the current problem.
2. Keep private information limited. Only record or share sensitive details when they are necessary.
3. Prefer evidence over memory. Link or describe the source that proves the state.
4. Write for review. A future reviewer should understand the action without knowing the conversation that led to it.
5. Separate urgent response from cleanup. Handle immediate risk first, then return to records and handoff notes.

Checklist

• Confirm the Communications state is visible, current, and tied to the correct scope.
• Confirm whether the message belongs in Email Blasts or SMS Blasts before drafting.
• Confirm the Audience filters state is visible, current, and tied to the correct scope.
• For SMS Blasts, confirm audience groups or exact-attendee selection, phone normalization, attendee SMS announcement preference, country-code grouping, selected-SIM policy, and verified online Android wrapper readiness before queueing.
• For SMS Blasts, do not treat consumer RCS as available unless the device/API reports a certified regular-user RCS capability.
• For gift receiver notices, confirm the receiver-facing copy respects the gifter’s anonymity choice and includes the gifter’s markdown-ext message only as attendee-facing text.
• Confirm the current actor is allowed to make the decision.
• Confirm the record is accurate enough for another person to rely on.
• Confirm the next action is proportional to the known facts.
• Confirm the handoff leaves a clear owner and open question list.

Examples of weak practice

• Saving a conclusion without the facts that support it.
• Changing a public page without checking the attendee path.
• Exporting or importing data without naming the file owner.
• Treating a technical success message as proof that the operational outcome is correct.
• Revealing a gift gifter’s username in a receiver-facing email or inbox notice when the gift was marked anonymous.
• Sending SMS to a mixed-country audience without checking the selected SIM home-country policy.
• Sending optional SMS announcements to attendees who disabled event SMS announcements in rego settings.
• Retrying a sent-but-unconfirmed SMS as if it definitely failed.

Strong handoff

A strong handoff includes scope, owner, changed record, reason, evidence, remaining risk, and next review time. Use related pages below when the practice crosses into another workflow.